Yet another game I played as a kid, I remember really enjoying this back then, like collecting solution for the puzzles made me feel really smart as a kid.

But now, the puzzles are extremely simple and even easy to brute force. Movement is clunky, capturing ghost is kinda like Luigi's Mansion, but worse, I imagine (I never played Luigi's Mansion).
Boss fights are really just capturing the smaller ghost until you can capture the big guy, with exception of the 2nd chapter boss which is the most memorable to me.

I had this game as a kid and I thought it was so hard so I never got anywhere but found it cool that you had these characters in a mansion environment, if only I could actually play it.

Those feelings of "it's too hard" kind of turned into "it's a cheap licensed game" after I figured out what that is over time so I just never tried playing it again. I even looked up some reviews of all the Scooby games at one point which none really seemed all that savory. Then one day, I was looking for some Scooby related clothes I could buy and couldn't find what I was looking for, nothing that said "medieval" or "ghost" and nothing said that more than the cover of this game, it always struck me as a kid. Like something out of a Goosebumps book.
So I went back to the source, this game. I got all three Gamecube games, starting with Night of 100 Frights because that cover always interested me since Charlie was on it but I never got to play it but ugh were the controls annoying, going too slow with walking speed, too fast with running and the sound effects repeated constantly. I ended up shutting it off and trying a different one first, because why not.

One thing I saw consistent in the reviews was that the opening cutscene is always a really nice homage but it seemed like all the Scooby games did that so it lost its novelty. With that said, with how cheesy the story and cutscenes are, it does feel like a Scooby Doo game, even the movements. There can be some overly long animations like climbing up on a crate but all in all it controls better than Night...why is that though?

It's not perfect but I think part of it is the mansion itself and how it's laid out. You're in close quarters but with enough variety and obstacles to not seem bland. Night wasn't bland, it was just more open so you can collect Scooby-Snacks so its faults were a lot more noticeable. In fact, the whole gameplay style has changed, rather than being a copy and paste, your goal isn't to collect Scooby Snacks, it's to, well, I'll let Velma explain it-

Sneaking is something that took me a long time to get over in games and it was Metal Gear Solid that made me finally get there but this isn't really a stealth game because you get this book that lets you absorb enemies into it using rapid presses of whatever button comes on screen.

So, no, it's not as hard as it was as a kid but that's because I made it harder than it had to be, I didn't understand that type of game yet or that you "could" be spotted by ghosts, just had to bypass them. I won't spoil the level variety but they just get longer from there. There are different sections of them and it does decent enough with pointing you in the right direction so you don't get lost and there are frequent save points but they're just longer winded is all. I'm convinced I never could've done those vehicle sections as a kid though, those gave me a run NOW.

It still falls for licensed game traps, especially using the same voice actors, hearing the same voice lines and sound effects over and over. They switch some up for the specific level you're on but like I said, those levels get longer. Sometimes they play over cutscene dialogue too. But all in all a decent experience that was never boring, I'm convinced enough to check out Night again and Unmasked now too.